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By All Means: Redesigning Education to Restore Opportunity

The Education Redesign Lab is creating By All Means: Redesigning Education to Restore Opportunity as part of our commitment to address the current failures of our education system, especially its limited efficacy in reducing social mobility. There will be two integrated components of this initiative: a consortium of cities that are committed to furthering a comprehensive change agenda, and a series of five convenings designed to re-envision the future of public education. We will consider new design principles as well as how to take the most promising school and community innovations to scale – and will address the challenging governance issues that often prevent this from happening.

The goal would be twofold: to connect entrepreneurial and committed city mayors, superintendents, and public officials from a select group of cities—those with the capacity to implement real reforms in a local context—directly with the expertise of Harvard faculty and design leaders; and to invigorate a national public dialogue with business and community leaders about what it would truly take to make success the rule, and not the exception, for students in poverty. Accordingly, these convenings will have both an invitational workshop for participating cities and a public forum.

The initiative will be tied to the ongoing work of the Education Redesign Lab, led by Professor Paul Reville, which is a major and comprehensive effort to design and test an entirely new concept for education in the United States. The city leaders who attend the convenings would also partner with the Education Redesign Lab by serving as lab sites for promising redesign efforts, so that the ideas developed and refined at the workshops could be rigorously tested in real-world municipal contexts, and provide models for other cities to learn from or emulate.